Posts tagged with “portfolio” and “design”
Who is Ross Brown?
This is the last micro-site I’ll make for myself for a while… I promise. View it in Safari, Chrome, or some other WebKit-based browser. Until everyone else catches up and implements CSS animations, transforms, and gradients as well as WebKit does, I’ll be happy to serve up a degraded experience to them.
Winterfresh Mint Style
I’m a big fan of Mint and use it to monitor stats on this site. During a span of free time yesterday I decided to create a new Style for it. The current native styles use a lot of images for rounded corners and shadow effects. As much as I like the Dark Pepper Mint theme, I wanted something lighter without being blinded by white.
There is heavy use of border-radius, border-image, box-shadow, and text-shadow CSS3 properties in the style. I also threw in some webkit-transition for tab background color animation and webkit-gradient for pane header backgrounds. I’m happy with how it turned out. Plus, Matt points out that using this Style on the iPad makes him feel like he works for NASA.
Tested in Safari 4, Firefox 3.6, Chrome, iPhone Mobile Safari, and iPad Mobile Safari. Webkit is a winner here. Internet Explorer untested and unsupported.
You can download the style from the Peppermill and fork it on Github.
Signal Chains (beta)
Matt and I have been working on Signal Chains for a few months, and are finally somewhat ready for the public to see it. I’m going to create a crisis here to make what we did seem so much cooler:
The Problem: Audio gear is expensive. Few brick and mortar stores carry expensive audio gear and will let you get your grubby little hands all over it before purchasing. Conversely, when people post audio samples online, you’re not always sure what is involved. Is it really that mic that sounds that way? Or is the preamp they’re using coloring the sound?
The Solution: Signal Chains is essentially a way for audio engineers (or those who call themselves audio engineers) to share their signal flows through audio samples, documenting each piece and process involved. It does this by providing a somewhat standardized method of doing so.
I just rolled out some “enhancements” to the theme of this site. I felt like the sidebar was getting crowded, so I added some navigation to the top of the page and eliminated some messiness.
“Links”, “About”, and “Contact” actually load in the content of their respective pages. Hopefully this makes my website look less pathetic due to the small amount of content.
“Music” and “Tags” show content from the sidebar, which is hidden if JavaScript is turned on. It all degrades pretty nicely.
The biggest challenge was achieve appropriate behavior of the resizing and hiding of header content; most notably when loading one set of information into the header without closing the box first. It’s all handled in the nav.js file using jQuery. I know there are quite a few redundancies in there, so if you’ve got an idea on a better way to achieve these results, fork the Master Plumber Chyrp theme which is entirely available on GitHub. Either way, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor by continuously clicking menu items.
I also recreated the sidebar background with a tighter wire grid look. The old one’s sloppiness had been bugging me for a while. The background is a recycled use of this image: 
which I created for another project.
I hope it’s all pleasing to your eyes. Mine are tired of looking at it.
Rails Rumble 09: Operator
Matt and I just finished this year’s Rails Rumble competition. For those unfamiliar, teams are given 48 hours to design, develop, and deploy a Ruby on Rails based web application. Our entry is was Operator, and you can read about it in our blog post.
I did all the visual design for Operator; we didn’t use a single stock image. I didn’t worry about IE at all during this 48 hours, and the site uses a lot of CSS3 attributes that make it prettier. Take a look at our team page for a look at the technologies used.
The landing page was something I threw together in Illustrator. All the icons were made in DrawIt. I’m pretty proud of my little creations and I think it will be a very useful service once we can really spend some time working on it.
I thought this was funny: Our commit graph, shown by the hour, for the weekend.
We finished our development a couple hours before the deadline, and I thought we used that time to push up a pretty bugless app. Unfortunately, after spending some more time with it in Firefox, we noticed there were a couple of hangnails on Operator. Apparently, Firefox doesn’t like console.log unless Firebug is on. Neither does Opera. Neither does IE. Major bummer.
So, if you take a look at Operator in Firefox, playing messages from the answering machine and adding tags to calls via drag-and-drop will not work. Everything else seems to be fine, though, and you can still add tags from the call tags section and listen to messages from within each call. Moral of the story: WebKit rules. Go download Safari or Chrome and experience web how it should be experienced.
Some other entries from the KC RoR Community:
Great job guys!